The Demand for Explanation
Now that more than 60 years have passed since
the military defeat of Nazi Germany, one might have thought that the name
of its leader would be all but forgotten. This is far from the case, however.
Even in the popular press, references to Hitler are incessant and the trickle
of TV documentaries on the Germany of his era would seem to be unceasing.
Hitler even featured on the cover of a 1995
Time magazine.
This finds its counterpart in the academic literature
too. Scholarly works on Hitler's deeds continue to emerge many years after
his death (e.g. Feuchtwanger, 1995) and in a survey of the history of Western
civilization, Lipson (1993) named Hitlerism and the nuclear bomb as the
two great evils of the 20th century. Stalin's tyranny lasted longer, Pol
Pot killed a higher proportion of his country's population and Hitler was
not the first Fascist but the name of Hitler nonetheless hangs over the
entire 20th century as something inescapably and inexplicably malign. It
seems doubtful that even the whole of the 21st century will erase from
the minds of thinking people the still largely unfulfilled need to understand
how and why Hitler became so influential and wrought so much evil.
The fact that so many young Germans (particular
from the formerly Communist East) today still salute his name and perpetuate
much of his politics is also an amazement and a deep concern to many and
what can only be called the resurgence of Nazism among many young Germans
at the close of the 20th century and onwards would seem to generate a continuing
and pressing need to understand the Hitler phenomenon.
So what was it that made Hitler so influential?
What was it that made him (as pre-war histories such as Roberts, 1938,
attest) the most popular man in the Germany of his day? Why does he still
have many admirers now in the Germany on which he inflicted such disasters?
What was (is?) his appeal? And why, of all things, are the young products
of an East German Communist upbringing still so susceptible to his message?
The context of Nazism
"True, it is a fixed idea with the French
that the Rhine is their property, but to this arrogant demand the only
reply worthy of the German nation is Arndt's: "Give back Alsace and Lorraine".
For I am of the opinion, perhaps in contrast to many whose standpoint I
share in other respects, that the reconquest of the German-speaking left
bank of the Rhine is a matter of national honour, and that the Germanisation
of a disloyal Holland and of Belgium is a political necessity for us. Shall
we let the German nationality be completely suppressed in these countries,
while the Slavs are rising ever more powerfully in the East?"
Have a look at the quote immediately above and say
who wrote it. It is a typical Hitler rant, is it not? Give it to 100 people
who know Hitler's speeches and 100 would identify it as something said
by Adolf. The fierce German nationalism and territorial ambition is unmistakeable.
And if there is any doubt, have a look at another quote from the same author:
This is our calling, that we shall become
the templars of this Grail, gird the sword round our loins for its sake
and stake our lives joyfully in the last, holy war which will be followed
by the thousand-year reign of freedom.
That settles it, doesn't it? Who does not know of
Hitler's glorification of military sacrifice and his aim to establish a
"thousand-year Reich"?
But neither quote is in fact from Hitler. Both
quotes were written by Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's co-author (See here
and here).
So let that be an introduction to the idea that Hitler not only called
himself a socialist but that he WAS in fact a socialist by the standards
of his day. Ideas that are now condemned as Rightist were in Hitler's day
perfectly normal ideas among Leftists. And if Friedrich Engels was not
a Leftist, I do not know who would be.
But the most spectacular aspect of Nazism was
surely its antisemitism. And that had a grounding in Marx himself. The
following
passage is from Marx but it could just as well have been from Hitler:
"Let us consider the actual, worldly
Jew -- not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us
not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for
the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of
Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of
the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. Very well then! Emancipation
from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Jewry, would
be the self-emancipation of our time.... We recognize in Jewry, therefore,
a general present-time-oriented anti-social element, an element which through
historical development -- to which in this harmful respect the Jews have
zealously contributed -- has been brought to its present high level, at
which it must necessarily dissolve itself. In the final analysis, the emancipation
of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Jewry".
Note that Marx wanted to "emancipate" (free) mankind
from Jewry ("Judentum" in Marx's original German), just as Hitler
did and that the title of Marx's essay in German was "Zur Judenfrage",
which -- while not necessarily derogatory in itself -- is nonetheless exactly
the same expression ("Jewish question") that Hitler used in his famous
phrase "Endloesung der Judenfrage" ("Final solution of the Jewish
question"). And when Marx speaks of the end of Jewry by saying that Jewish
identity must necessarily "dissolve" itself, the word he uses in German
is "aufloesen", which is a close relative of Hitler's word "Endloesung"
("final solution"). So all the most condemned features of Nazism can be
traced back to Marx and Engels, right down to the language used. The thinking
of Hitler, Marx and Engels differed mainly in emphasis rather than in content.
All three were second-rate German intellectuals of their times. Anybody
who doubts that practically all Hitler's ideas were also to be found in
Marx & Engels should spend a little time reading the quotations from
Marx & Engels archived here.
Another
point:
"Everything must be different!" or "Alles
muss anders sein!" was a slogan of the Nazi Party. It is also the heart's
desire of every Leftist since Karl Marx. Nazism was a deeply revolutionary
creed, a fact that is always denied by the Left; but it's true. Hitler
and his criminal gang hated the rich, the capitalists, the Jews, the Christian
Churches, and "the System".
Iconography
And now for something that is very rarely mentioned
indeed:
Have a guess about where the iconography above
comes from:
As you may be able to guess from the Cyrillic
writing accompanying it, it was a Soviet Swastika -- used by the Red Army
during and after World War I. It was worn as a shoulder patch by some Soviet
troops. The Swastika too was a socialist symbol long before Hitler became
influential. Prewar socialists (including some American socialists) used
it on the grounds that it has two arms representing two entwined letters
"S" (for "Socialist"). So even Hitler's symbolism was Leftist.
He did however give the symbol his own twist when
he
said: "Als nationale Sozialisten sehen wir in unserer Flagge unser
Programm. Im Rot sehen wir den sozialen Gedanken der Bewegung, im Weiss
den nationalistischen, im Hakenkreuz die Mission des Kampfes fuer den Sieg
des arischen Menschen und zugleich mit ihm auch den Sieg des Gedankens
der schaffenden Arbeit" ("As National socialists we see our programme
in our flag. In red we see the social thoughts of the movement, in white
the nationalist thoughts, in the hooked-cross the mission of fighting for
the victory of Aryan man and at the same time the victory of the concept
of creative work").
In German, not only the word "Socialism" (Sozialismus)
but also the word "Victory" (Sieg) begins with an "S". So he said
that the two letters "S" in the hooked-cross (swastika) also stood for
the victory of Aryan man and the victory of the idea that the "worker"
was a creative force: Nationalism plus socialism again, in other words.
{Technical note: Translating Hitler into English
often runs up against the fact that he uses lots of German words that have
no exact English equivalent (I comment, for instance, on
Volk and
Reich here).
I have translated "schaffen" above as "create" (as does Ralph Manheim in
his widely-used translation of Mein Kampf -- p. 452) but it has
the larger meaning of providing and accomplishing things in general. So
Hitler was clearly using the word to stress the central importance of the
working man. In English, "creative" is often used to refer to artistic
activities. That is NOT the meaning of "schaffen"} |
And by Hitler's time, antisemitism in particular,
as well as racism in general, already had a long history on the Left. August
Bebel was the founder of Germany's Social Democratic party (mainstream
Leftists) and his best-known saying is that antisemitism is der Sozialismus
des bloeden Mannes (usually translated as "the socialism of fools")
-- which implicitly recognized the antisemitism then prevalent on the Left.
And Lenin himself alluded to the same phenomenon in saying that "it is
not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people" but "the capitalists
of all countries." For more on the socialist roots of antisemitism see
Tyler Cowen's detailed survey here
It should be borne in mind, however, that antisemitism
was pervasive in Europe of the 19th and early 20th century. Many conservatives
were antisemitic too. Leftists were merely the most enthusistic practitioners
of it. We have seen how virulent it was in Marx. Antisemitism among conservatives,
by contrast, was usually not seen by them as a major concern. British Conservatives
made the outspokenly Jewish Benjamin Disraeli their Prime Minister in the
19th century and the man who actually declared war on Hitler -- Neville
Chamberlain -- himself had antisemitic views.
And Leftism is notoriously prone to "splits" so
there were no doubt some Leftists who disavowed antisemitism on principled
grounds. Lenin clearly criticized antisemitism on strategic grounds: It
distracted from his class-war objectives. So were there also disinterested
objections from Leftists? Such objectors are rather hard to find. The opposition
to the persecution of the unfortunate Captain Alfred Dreyfus (who was Jewish)
by Emile Zola in France is sometimes quoted but Zola was primarily an advocate
of French naturalism, which was a form of physical determinism -- rather
at odds with the usual Leftist view of man as a "blank slate". And the
man who published Zola's famous challenge to the persecution of Dreyfus
was Georges Clemenceau, who is these days most famous for his remark: "If
a man is not a socialist in his youth, he has no heart. If he is not a
conservative by the time he is 30 he has no head"
But, however you cut it, Hitler's antisemitism
was of a piece with his Leftism, not a sign of "Rightism".
One more bit of iconography that may serve to
reinforce that point:
The "Roman" salute is generally said to have
been invented by Mussolini but Musso was a Marxist who knew Lenin well
so it is not surprising that Stalin was influenced by Musso's ideas for
a while.
The posters above come via a documentary film
called Soviet Story.
See here.
The film has had a lot of praise from people who should know and it reinforces
much that I say above and below here.
Labor unions
Who said this? A representative of the 21st century
U.S. Democratic party, maybe?
"As things stand today, the trade unions
in my opinion cannot be dispensed with. On the contrary, they are among
the most important institutions of the nation's economic life. Their significance
lies not only in the social and political field, but even more in the general
field of national politics. A people whose broad masses, through a sound
trade-union movement, obtain the satisfaction of their living requirements
and at the same time an education, will be tremendously strengthened in
its power of resistance in the struggle for existence".
It could well be any Leftist speaker of the present
time but it is in fact a small excerpt from chapter
12 of Mein Kampf, wherein Hitler goes to great lengths to stress
the importance of unions. The association between unions and Leftism is
of course historic and, as a Leftist, Hitler made great efforts to enlist
unions as supporters of his party.
A modern Leftist
Let us look at what the Left and Right in politics
consist of at present. Consider this description by Edward
Feser of someone who would have been a pretty good Presidential candidate
for the modern-day U.S. Democratic party:
He had been something of a bohemian in
his youth, and always regarded young people and their idealism as the key
to progress and the overcoming of outmoded prejudices. And he was widely
admired by the young people of his country, many of whom belonged to organizations
devoted to practicing and propagating his teachings. He had a lifelong
passion for music, art, and architecture, and was even something of a painter.
He rejected what he regarded as petty bourgeois moral hang-ups, and he
and his girlfriend "lived together" for years. He counted a number of homosexuals
as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man's personal morals
were none of his business; some scholars of his life believe that he himself
may have been homosexual or bisexual. He was ahead of his time where a
number of contemporary progressive causes are concerned: he disliked smoking,
regarding it as a serious danger to public health, and took steps to combat
it; he was a vegetarian and animal lover; he enacted tough gun control
laws; and he advocated euthanasia for the incurably ill.
He championed the rights of workers, regarded
capitalist society as brutal and unjust, and sought a third way between
communism and the free market. In this regard, he and his associates greatly
admired the strong steps taken by President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal
to take large-scale economic decision-making out of private hands and put
it into those of government planning agencies. His aim was to institute
a brand of socialism that avoided the inefficiencies that plagued the Soviet
variety, and many former communists found his program highly congenial.
He deplored the selfish individualism he took to be endemic to modern Western
society, and wanted to replace it with an ethic of self-sacrifice: "As
Christ proclaimed 'love one another'," he said, "so our call -- 'people's
community,' 'public need before private greed,' 'communally-minded social
consciousness'
-- rings out.! This call will echo throughout the world!"
The reference to Christ notwithstanding, he was
not personally a Christian, regarding the Catholicism he was baptized into
as an irrational superstition. In fact he admired Islam more than Christianity,
and he and his policies were highly respected by many of the Muslims of
his day. He and his associates had a special distaste for the Catholic
Church and, given a choice, preferred modern liberalized Protestantism,
taking the view that the best form of Christianity would be one that forsook
the traditional other-worldly focus on personal salvation and accommodated
itself to the requirements of a program for social justice to be implemented
by the state. They also considered the possibility that Christianity might
eventually have to be abandoned altogether in favor of a return to paganism,
a worldview many of them saw as more humane and truer to the heritage of
their people. For he and his associates believed strongly that a people's
ethnic and racial heritage was what mattered most. Some endorsed a kind
of cultural relativism according to which what is true or false and right
or wrong in some sense depends on one's ethnic worldview, and especially
on what best promotes the well-being of one's ethnic group
There is surely no doubt that the man Feser
describes sounds very much like a mainstream Leftist by current standards.
But who is the man concerned? It is a historically accurate description
of Adolf Hitler. Hitler was not only a socialist in his own day but he
would even be a mainstream socialist in MOST ways today. Feser does not
mention Hitler's antisemitism above, of course, but that too seems once
again to have become mainstream among the Western-world Left in the early
years of the 21st century. See here
for more on that.
One way in which Hitler was unlike modern American
Leftist political leaders, however, is that he was to a considerable extent
a genuine man of culture.
This
photo shows him in white tie and tails attending the Wagner opera festival
at Bayreuth in 1939. There is no doubt of his real devotion to opera --
and indeed
to
classical music generally. Any claim that a devotion to high culture
is especially virtuous does therefore tend to be undermined by Hitler's
example -- if that is not too ad hominem.
So there is no claim that Hitler
was WHOLLY like modern democratic Leftists. In ways other than those so
far mentioned, Hitler was, as has already been detailed to some extent,
more like his Communist predecessors. Ludwig
von Mises speaks of those similarities. Writing in 1944 he said:
"The Nazis have not only imitated the Bolshevist
tactics of seizing power. They have copied much more. They have imported
from Russia the one-party system and the privileged role of this party
and its members in public life; the paramount position of the secret police;
the organization of affiliated parties abroad which are employed in fighting
their domestic governments and in sabotage and espionage, assisted by public
funds and the protection of the diplomatic and consular service; the administrative
execution and imprisonment of political adversaries; concentration camps;
the punishment inflicted on the families of exiles; the methods of propaganda.
They have borrowed from the Marxians even such absurdities as the mode
of address, party comrade (Parteigenosse), derived from the Marxian
comrade (Genosse), and the use of a military terminology for all
items of civil and economic life. The question is not in which respects
both systems are alike but in which they differ..."
(For those who are unaware of it, Von Mises
was an Austrian Jewish intellectual and a remarkably prescient
economist. He got out of Vienna just hours ahead of the Gestapo. He did
therefore have both every reason and every opportunity to be a close observer
of Nazism. So let us also read a bit of what
he said about the Nazi economy:)
The Nazis did not, as their foreign admirers contend,
enforce price control within a market economy. With them price control
was only one device within the frame of an all-around system of central
planning. In the Nazi economy there was no question of private initiative
and free enterprise. All production activities were directed by the Reichswirtschaftsministerium.
No enterprise was free to deviate in the conduct of its operations from
the orders issued by the government. Price control was only a device in
the complex of innumerable decrees and orders regulating the minutest details
of every business activity and precisely fixing every individual's tasks
on the one hand and his income and standard of living on the other.
What made it difficult for many people to grasp
the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis
did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they
did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused
in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis
removed the bourgeois completely from control. Those entrepreneurs who
were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained
their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely
salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders
of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party.
And let us look at the words of someone who was
actually in Germany in the 1930s and who thus saw Nazism close up. He
said:
"If I'd been German and not a Jew, I
could see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see
how they'd become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when
you didn't believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally
transformed."
So who said that? It was the famous historian, Eric
Hobsbawm (original surname: Obstbaum), who became a Communist instead
and who later became known as perhaps Britain's most resolute Communist.
Hobsbawn clearly saw only slight differences between Communism and Nazism
at that time. And as this
summary of a book (by Richard Overy) comparing Hitler and Stalin says:
"But the resemblances are inescapable.
Both tyrannies relied on a desperate ideology of do-or-die confrontation.
Both were obsessed by battle imagery: 'The dictatorships were military
metaphors, founded to fight political war.' And despite the rhetoric about
a fate-struggle between socialism and capitalism, the two economic systems
converged strongly. Stalin's Russia permitted a substantial private sector,
while Nazi Germany became rapidly dominated by state direction and state-owned
industries.
In a brilliant passage, Overy compares the experience
of two economic defectors. Steel magnate Fritz Thyssen fled to Switzerland
because he believed that Nazi planning was 'Bolshevising' Germany. Factory
manager Victor Kravchenko defected in 1943 because he found that class
privilege and the exploitation of labour in Stalinist society were no better
than the worst excesses of capitalism.
As Overy says, much that the two men did was pointless.
Why camps? Prisons would have held all their dangerous opponents Who really
needed slave labour, until the war? What did that colossal surplus of cruelty
and terror achieve for the regimes? 'Violence was... regarded as redemptive,
saving society from imaginary enemies.'"
And let us listen to Hitler himself on the matter:
"There is more that binds us to Bolshevism
than separates us from it. There is, above all, genuine, revolutionary
feeling, which is alive everywhere in Russia except where there are Jewish
Marxists. I have always made allowance for this circumstance, and given
orders that former Communists are to be admitted to the party at once.
The petit bourgeois Social-Democrat and the trade-union boss will never
make a National Socialist, but the Communists always will."
Another quote:
"Of what importance is all that, if I range men
firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them own land or factories
as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through
the Party, is supreme over them regardless of whether they are owners or
workers. All that is unessential; our socialism goes far deeper. It establishes
a relationship of the individual to the State, the national community.
Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human
beings."
(Both quotes above are from Hermann Rauschning
in Hitler Speaks, London, T. Butterworth, 1940, also called The
Voice of Destruction. See e.g. here.
Because what he records is so inconvenient, many
contemporary historians dismiss Rauschning's 1940 book as inaccurate, even
though it is perfectly in accord with everything else we now know about
Hitler. But no-one disputes that Rauschning was a prominent Nazi for a
time. He was however basically a conservative so eventually became disillusioned
with the brutalities of Nazism and went into opposition to it. Rauschning's
book was in fact prophetic, which certainly tends to indicate that he knew
what he was talking about.)
Party programmes
Let us start by considering political party programmes
or "platforms" of Hitler's day:
Take this description of a political programme:
A declaration of war against the order
of things which exist, against the state of things which exist, in a word,
against the structure of the world which presently exists".
And this description of a political movement as having
a 'revolutionary creative will' which had 'no fixed aim, no permanency,
only eternal change'
And this policy manifesto:
9. All citizens of the State shall be
equal as regards rights and duties.
10. The first duty of every citizen must be to
work mentally or physically. The activities of the individual may not clash
with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the frame of the
community and be for the general good.
Therefore we demand:
11. That all unearned income, and all income that
does not arise from work, be abolished.
12. Since every war imposes on the people fearful
sacrifices in life and property, all personal profit arising from the war
must be regarded as a crime against the people. We therefore demand the
total confiscation of all war profits whether in assets or material.
13. We demand the nationalization of businesses
which have been organized into cartels.
14. We demand that all the profits from wholesale
trade shall be shared out.
15. We demand extensive development of provision
for old age.
16. We demand the creation and maintenance of
a healthy middle-class, the immediate communalization of department stores
which will be rented cheaply to small businessmen, and that preference
shall be given to small businessmen for provision of supplies needed by
the State, the provinces and municipalities.
17. We demand a land reform in accordance with
our national requirements, and the enactment of a law to confiscate from
the owners without compensation any land needed for the common purpose.
The abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in
land.
So who put that
manifesto forward and who was responsible for the summary quotes given
before that? Was it the US Democrats, the British Labour Party, the Canadian
Liberals, some European Social Democratic party? No. The manifesto is an
extract from the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the National Socialist
German Workers Party and was written by the leader of that party: Adolf
Hitler. And the preceding summary quotes were also from him (See Vol.
2 Chap. 5 of Mein Kampf and O'Sullivan, 1983. p. 138).
The rest of Hitler's manifesto was aimed mainly
at the Jews but in Hitler's day it was very common
for Leftists to be antisemitic. And the increasingly pervasive anti-Israel
sentiment among the modern-day Left -- including at times the Canadian
government -- shows that modern-day Leftists are not even very different
from Hitler in that regard. Modern-day anti-Israel protesters still seem
to think that dead Jews are a good thing.
The Nazi election poster below is headed: "We
workers are awoken" ("Wir Arbeiter sind erwacht")
Other examples
of Hitler's Leftism
Further, as a good socialist does, Hitler justified
everything he did in the name of "the people" (Das Volk). The Nazi
State was, like the Soviet State, all-powerful, and the Nazi party, in
good socialist fashion, instituted pervasive supervision of German industry.
And of course Hitler and Stalin were initially allies. It was only the
Nazi-Soviet pact that enabled Hitler's conquest of Western Europe. The
fuel in the tanks of Hitler's Panzern as they stormed through France
was Soviet fuel.
And a book that was very fashionable worldwide
in the '60s was the 1958 book "The Affluent Society" by influential
"liberal" Canadian economist J.K. Galbraith -- in which he fulminated about
what he saw as our "Private affluence and public squalor". But Hitler preceded
him. Hitler shared with the German Left of his day the slogan: "Gemeinnutz
vor Eigennutz" (Common use before private use). And who preceded Hitler
in that? Friedrich Engels at one stage ran a publication called Gemeinnuetziges
Wochenblatt ("Common-use Weekly").
And we all know how evil Nazi
eugenics were, don't we? How crazy were their efforts to build up the "master
race" through selective breeding of SS men with the best of German women
-- the "Lebensborn" project? Good Leftists today recoil in horror
from all that of course. But who were the great supporters of eugenics
in Hitler's day? They were in fact American Leftists -- and eugenics was
only one of the ideas that Hitler got from that source.
What
later came to be known as Fascism was in fact essentially the same as what
was known in the USA of the late 19th and early 20th century as "Progressivism",
so Fascism is in fact as much an American invention as a European one.
The Europeans carried out fully the ideas that American Leftists invented
but could only partially implement. America itself resisted the worst of
the Fascist virus but much of Europe did not. The American Left have a
lot to answer for. I have outlined the largely Leftist roots of eugenics
here
and the largely American roots of Fascism here.
So even Hitler's eugenics were yet another part
of Hitler's LEFTISM! He got his eugenic theories from the Leftists of his
day. He was simply being a good Leftist intellectual in subscribing to
such theories.
Hitler the Greenie
And Hitler also of course foreshadowed the Red/Green
alliance of today. The Nazis were in fact probably the first major political
party in the Western world to have a thoroughgoing "Green" agenda. I take
the following brief summary from Andrew
Bolt:
Hitler's preaching about German strength
and destiny was water in the desert to the millions of Germans who'd been
stripped of pride, security and hope by their humiliating defeat in World
War I, and the terrible unemployment that followed.
The world was also mad then with the idea that
a dictatorial government should run the economy itself and make it "efficient",
rather than let people make their own decisions.
The Nazis -- National Socialists -- promised some
of that, and their sibling rivals in the Communist Party more.
The theory of eugenics -- breeding only healthy
people -- was also in fashion, along with a cult of health.
The Nazis, with their youth camps and praise of
strong bodies and a strong people, endorsed all that, and soon were killing
the retarded, the gay and the different.
Tribalism was popular, too. People weren't individuals,
but members of a class, as the communists argued, or of a race, as the
Nazis said. Free from freedom -- what a relief for the scared!
You'd think we'd have learned. But too much of
such thinking is back and changing us so fast that we can't say how our
society will look by the time we die.
A KIND of eugenics is with us again, along with
an obsession for perfect bodies.
Children in the womb are being killed just weeks
before birth for the sin of being a dwarf, for instance, and famed animal
rights philosopher Peter Singer wants parents free to kill deformed children
in their first month of life. Meanwhile support for euthanasia for the
sick, tired or incompetent grows.
As for tribalism, that's also back -- and as official
policy. We now pay people to bury their individuality in tribes, giving
them multicultural grants or even an Aboriginal "parliament".
But most dangerous is that we strip our children
of pride, security and even hope. They are taught that God is dead, our
institutions corrupt, our people racist, our land ruined, our past evil
and our future doomed by global warming.
Many have also watched one of their parents leave
the family home, which to some must seem a betrayal.
They are then fed a culture which romanticises
violence and worships sex -- telling them there is nothing more to life
than the cravings of their bodies.
No one can live like this and be fulfilled. People
need to feel part of something bigger and better than ourselves -- a family,
or a church, or a tradition or a country. Or, as a devil may whisper, the
greens.
The greens. Here's a quote which may sound very
familiar -- at least in part. "We recognise that separating humanity from
nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind's own destruction and
to the death of nations. "Only through a re-integration of humanity into
the whole of nature can our people be made stronger . .
"This striving toward connectedness with the totality
of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the
deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."
That was Ernst Lehmann, a leading biologist under
the Nazi regime, in 1934, and he wasn't alone. Hitler, for one, was an
avid vegetarian and green, addicted to homoepathic cures. His regime sponsored
the creation of organic farming, and SS leader Heinrich Himmler even grew
herbs on his own organic farm with which to treat his beloved troops.
HITLER also banned medical experiments on animals,
but not, as we know to our grief, on Jewish children. And he created many
national parks, particularly for Germany's "sacred" forests.
This isn't a coincidence. The Nazis drew heavily
on a romantic, anti-science, nature worshipping, communal and anti-capitalist
movement that tied German identity to German forests. In fact, Professor
Raymond Dominick notes in his book, The Environmental Movement in Germany,
two-thirds of the members of Germany's main nature clubs had joined the
Nazi Party by 1939, compared with just 10 per cent of all men.
The Nazis also absorbed the German Youth Movement,
the Wandervogel, which talked of our mystical relationship with
the earth. Peter Staudenmaier, co-author of Ecofascism:
Lessons from the German Experience, says it was for the Wandervogel
that the philosopher Ludwig Klages wrote his influential essay Man and
Earth in 1913.
In it, Klages warned of the growing extinction
of species, the destruction of forests, the genocide of aboriginal peoples,
the disruption of the ecosystem and the killing of whales. People were
losing their relationship with nature, he warned.
Heard all that recently? I'm not surprised. This
essay by this notorious anti-Semite was republished in 1980 to mark the
birth of the German Greens -- the party that inspired the creation of our
own Greens party.
Its message is much as Hitler's own in Mein
Kampf: "When people attempt to rebel against the iron logic of nature,
they come into conflict with the very same principles to which they owe
their existence as human beings. Their actions against nature must lead
to their own downfall."
Why does this matter now? Because we must learn
that people who want animals to be treated like humans really want humans
to be treated like animals.
We must realise a movement that stresses "natural
order" and the low place of man in a fragile world, is more likely to think
man is too insignificant to stand in the way of Mother Earth, or the Fatherland,
or some other man-hating god.
We see it already. A Greenpeace co-founder, Paul
Watson, called humans the "AIDS of the earth", and one of the three key
founders of the German Greens, Herbert Gruhl, said the environmental crisis
was so acute the state needed perhaps "dictatorial powers".
And our growing church of nature worshippers insist
that science make way for their fundamentalist religion, bringing us closer
to a society in which muscle, not minds, must rule.
It's as a former head of Greenpeace International,
Patrick Moore, says: "In the name of speaking for the trees and other species,
we are faced with a movement that would usher in an era of eco-fascism."
This threat is still small. But if we don't resist
it today, who knows where it will sweep us tomorrow?
Lebensraum
and the population "problem"
Reading Mein Kampf can be a perverse sort
of fun. You can open almost any page of it at random and hear echoes of
the modern-day Left and Greens. The points I mention in this present article
are just a sampling. I could fill a book with examples showing that Hitler
was not only a Leftist in his day but that he was also a pretty good Leftist
by modern standards. His
antisemitism would certainly pass unremarked by much of the Left today.
Among students of the Nazi period it is well-known
that Hitler's most central concern after getting rid of the Jews was Lebensraum
for Germany -- i.e. taking over the lands of Eastern Europe for Germans.
But WHY did Hitler want Lebensraum (literally, "life-space") for
Germans? It was because, like the Greenies of today, he was concerned about
overpopulation and scarcity of natural resources.
Greenie Paul
Ehrlich wrote in his 1968 book The population bomb:
"The battle to feed all of humanity is
over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve
to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late
date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."
Hitler shared Ehrlich's pessimism:
"Germany has an annual increase in population
of nearly nine hundred thousand souls. The difficulty of feeding this army
of new citizens must grow greater from year to year and ultimately end
in catastrophe, unless ways and means are found to forestall the danger
of starvation and misery in time... Without doubt the productivity of the
soil can be increased up to a certain limit. But only up to a certain limit,
and not continuously without end..... But even with the greatest limitation
on the one hand and the utmost industry on other, here again a limit will
one day be reached, created by the soil itself. With the utmost toil it
will not be possible to obtain any more from it, and then, though postponed
for a certain time, catastrophe again manifests itself". (Mein Kampf
pp. 121 & 122).
Both Prof. Ehrlich and Hitler were intelligent but
overconfident Green/Left ignoramuses who knew nothing of the economics
concerned -- as is shown by the almost hilarious wrongness of Ehrlich's
predictions -- but Hitler unfortunately had the means to do something about
his ill-informed theories. He concluded that rather than let Germans starve,
he would grab more land off other people to feed them -- and the rest is
indeed history.
It may be noted that Greenie theories (such as
"global warming") have strong support in academic circles these days. And
so it was in Hitler's day. While he was in Landsberg prison after the "Beer-hall
Putsch", Hitler received weekly tutorials from Karl Haushofer, a University
of Munich professor of politics and a proponent of Lebensraum. Interesting
to see where academic fears of resources "running out" can lead!
"Gun-nut"?
But surely Hitler was at least like US conservatives
in being a "gun nut"? Far from it. Weimar (pre-Hitler) Germany already
had strict limits on private ownership of firearms (limits enacted by a
Left-leaning government) and the Nazis continued these for the first five
years of their rule. It was not until March 18, 1938 that the Reichstag
("State Assembly" -- i.e. the German Federal Parliament) passed a new Weapons
Law (or Waffengesetz). The new law contained a lessening of some
restrictions but an increase in others. Essentially, from that point on,
only politically reliable people would be issued with permits to own guns.
For some details of the very large number of controls in the new law, see
here
Wal-Mart hatred
One of the more notable insanities of the U.S.
Left in the early 21st centrury was Wal-Mart hatred. Anyone who took Leftist
advocacy of "the poor" at face-value might have expected that anything
which raises the living standards of the poor (which Wal-Mart undoubtedly
did) would be warmly welcomed by the Left. But the converse was the case:
Seething hate was what Wal-Mart got from the Left. In the run-up to the
2006 mid-term Federal election, one sometimes got the impression that the
Democrats were campaigning against Wal-mart rather than against the Republicans.
Why such extreme fuming? Because Leftists hate
anything big and successfuil and Wal-Mart was very big and very successful.
And British supermarket chains such as Tesco were also despised by British
Leftists -- albeit in a somewhat more restrained way. Confronted with either
Wal-Mart or Tesco, Leftists suddenly discovered a love of small business
-- the quintessential bourgeoisie whom Leftists had been loudly decrying
ever since Marx!
There was of course no Wal-Mart in Hitler's day.
But there was something very similar -- large Department stores. And Hitler
hated them. Item 16 of the (February 25th., 1920) 25 point plan of the
National Socialist German Workers Party (written by Hitler) sought the
abolition of big stores and their replacement by small businesses.
One of the British ex-Marxists at
"Spiked"
has a comprehensive article on the similarities between the Nazis and the
British supermarket-haters of the modern era. A useful excerpt:
"As the Nazi Party attracted considerable
numbers of the Mittelstand to its programme, physical attacks, boycotts
and discrimination against department and chain stores started to increase.
Such street-level chainstore-bashing initiatives "were quickly backed by
a Law for the Protection of Individual Trade passed on 12 May 1933", writes
Evans.
In a similar way to the current recommendations put forward by the [U.K.]
Competition Commission, in Nazi Germany "chain stores were forbidden to
expand or open new branches". Towards the end of 1933, the Nazi Party introduced
further moves along the lines currently outlined by the Competition Commission:
"Department and chain stores were prohibited from offering a discount of
more than three per cent on prices, a measure also extended to consumer
co-operatives."
More Leftist than
racist?
Hitler was in fact even more clearly a Leftist
than he was a nationalist or a racist. Although in his speeches he undoubtedly
appealed to the nationalism of the German people, Locke
(2001) makes a strong case that Hitler was not in fact a very good
nationalist in that he always emphasized that his primary loyalty was to
what he called the Aryan race -- and Germany was only one part of that
race. Locke then goes on to point out that Hitler was not even a very consistent
racist in that the Dutch, the Danes etc. were clearly Aryan even by Hitler's
own eccentric definition yet he attacked them whilst at the same time allying
himself with the very non-Aryan Japanese. And the Russians and the Poles
(whom Hitler also attacked) are rather more frequently blonde and blue-eyed
(Hitler's ideal) than the Germans themselves are! So what DID Hitler believe
in?
In his book Der Fuehrer, prewar Leftist
writer Konrad Heiden corrects the now almost universal assumption that
Hitler's idea of race was biologically-based. The Nazi conception of race
traces, as is well-known, to the work of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. But
what did Chamberlain say about race? It should not by now be surprising
that he said something that sounds thoroughly Leftist. Anthropologist
Robert Gayre summarizes Chamberlain's ideas as follows:
"On the contrary he taught (like many
"progressives" today) that racial mixture was desirable, for, according
to him, it was only out of racial mixture that the gifted could be created.
He considered that the evidence of this was provided by the
Prussian, whom
he saw as the superman, resulting from a cross between the German (or Anglo-Saxon
"German") and the Slav. From this Chamberlain went on to argue that the
sum of all these talented people would then form a "race," not of blood
but of "affinity."
So the Nazi idea of race rejected biology just as
thoroughly as modern Leftist ideas about race do! If that seems all too
jarring to believe, Gayre goes on to discuss the matter at length.
So although Hitler made powerful USE of German
nationalism, we see from both the considerations put forward by Locke and
the intellectual history discussed by Gayre, that Hitler was not in fact
much motivated by racial loyalty as we would normally conceive it. So what
was he motivated by?
Locke suggests that Hitler's actions are best
explained by saying that he simply had a love of war but offers no explanation
of WHY Hitler would love war. Hitler's extreme Leftism does explain this
however. As the quotations already given show, Hitler shared with other
Leftists a love of constant change and excitement --- and what could offer
more of that than war (or, in the case of other Leftists, the civil war
of "revolution")?
See here
for a more extensive treatment of what motivates Leftists generally.
The idea that Nazism was motivated primarily by
a typically Leftist hunger for change and excitement and hatred of the
status quo is reinforced by the now famous account of life in Nazi Germany
given by a young "Aryan" who lived through it. Originally written before
World War II, Haffner's
(2002) account of why Hitler rose to power stresses the boring nature
of ordinary German life and observes that the appeal of the Nazis lay in
their offering of relief from that:
"The great danger of life in Germany
has always been emptiness and boredom ... The menace of monotony hangs,
as it has always hung, over the great plains of northern and eastern Germany,
with their colorless towns and their all too industrious, efficient, and
conscientious business and organizations. With it comes a horror vacui
and the yearning for 'salvation': through alcohol, through superstition,
or, best of all, through a vast, overpowering, cheap mass intoxication."
So he too saw the primary appeal of Nazism as its
offering of change, novelty and excitement.
And how about another direct quote from Hitler
himself?
"We are socialists, we are enemies of
today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically
weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human
being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance,
and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions"
(Speech of May 1, 1927. Quoted by Toland, 1976, p.
306)
Clearly, the idea that Hitler was a Rightist is
probably the most successful BIG LIE of the 20th Century. He was to the
Right of the Communists but that is all. Nazism was nothing more nor less
than a racist form of Leftism (rather extreme Leftism at that) and to label
it as "Rightist" or anything else is to deny reality.
The word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation of the
name of Hitler's political party -- the nationalsozialistische Deutsche
Arbeiter Partei. In English this translates to "The National Socialist
German Worker's Party". So Hitler was a socialist and a champion of the
workers -- or at least he identified himself as such and campaigned as
such.
There is a great deal of further
reading available that extends the points made here about the nature of
Nazism and Fascism. There is, for instance, an interesting review by Prof.
Antony Flew here
of The Lost Literature of Socialism by historian George Watson.
Excerpt:
Many of his findings are astonishing.
Perhaps for readers today the most astonishing of all is that "In the European
century that began in the 1840s, from Engels' article of 1849 down to the
death of Hitler, everyone who advocated genocide called himself a socialist
and no conservative, liberal, anarchist or independent did anything of
the kind." (The term "genocide" in Watson's usage is not confined to the
extermination only of races or of ethnic groups, but embraces also the
liquidation of such other complete human categories as "enemies of the
people" and "the Kulaks as a class.")
The book seems well worth reading but is not of course
available online. An excellent earlier essay by Prof. Watson covering some
of the same ground is however available here.
He shows in it that even such revered figures in the history of socialism
as G.B. Shaw and Beatrice Webb were vocally in favour of genocide.
We do however need to keep
in mind that there is no such thing as PURE Leftism. Leftists are notoriously
fractious, sectarian and multi-branched. And even the Fascist branch of
Leftism was far from united. The modern-day Left always talk as if Italy's
Mussolini and Hitler were two peas in a pod but that is far from the truth.
Mussolini got pretty unprintable about Hitler at times and did NOT support
Hitler's genocide against the Jews (Steinberg, 1990; Herzer, 1989). As
it says here:
"Just as none of the victorious powers
went to war with Germany to save the Jews neither did Mussolini go to war
with them to exterminate the Jews. Indeed, once the Holocaust was under
way he and his fascists refused to deport Jews to the Nazi death camps
thus saving thousands of Jewish lives - far more than Oskar Schindler."
"Far more than Oskar Schindler"!. And as late
as 1938, Mussolini even asked the Pope to excommunicate
Hitler!. Leftists are very good at "fraternal" rivalry.
So unity is not of the Left in any of its forms.
They only ever have SOME things in common -- such as claiming to represent
"the worker" and seeking a State that controls as much of people's lives
as it feasibly can.
Tom
Wolfe's biting essay on American intellectuals also summarizes the
origins of Fascism and Nazism rather well. Here is one excerpt from it:
"Fascism" was, in fact, a Marxist coinage.
Marxists borrowed the name of Mussolini's Italian party, the Fascisti,
and applied it to Hitler's Nazis, adroitly papering over the fact that
the Nazis, like Marxism's standard-bearers, the Soviet Communists, were
revolutionary socialists. In fact, "Nazi" was (most annoyingly) shorthand
for the National Socialist German Workers' Party. European Marxists successfully
put over the idea that Nazism was the brutal, decadent last gasp of "capitalism."
{From the essay "In the Land of the Rococo Marxists"
originally appearing in the June 2000 Harper's Monthly and reprinted
in Wolfe's book Hooking Up}
Other sources on the basic facts about Hitler that
history tells us are Roberts (1938), Heiden (1939), Shirer (1964), Bullock
(1964), Taylor (1963), Hagan (1966), Feuchtwanger (1995).
The above are however secondary
sources and, as every historian will tell you, there is nothing like going
back to the original -- which is why much original text is quoted above.
For further reading in the original sources, the first stop is of course
Mein Kampf. It seems customary to portray
Mein Kampf as the
ravings of a madman but it is far from that. It is the attempt of an intelligent
mind to comprehend the world about it and makes its points in such a personal
and passionate way that it might well persuade many people today but for
a knowledge of where it led. The best collection of original Nazi documents
on the web is however probably
here.
Perhaps deserving of particular mention among the documents available there
is a widely circulated pamphlet by Goebbels here.
One excerpt from it:
The bourgeois is about to leave the historical
stage. In its place will come the class of productive workers, the working
class, that has been up until today oppressed. It is beginning to fulfill
its political mission. It is involved in a hard and bitter struggle for
political power as it seeks to become part of the national organism. The
battle began in the economic realm; it will finish in the political. It
is not merely a matter of pay, not only a matter of the number of hours
worked in a day-though we may never forget that these are an essential,
perhaps even the most significant part of the socialist platform-but it
is much more a matter of incorporating a powerful and responsible class
in the state, perhaps even to make it the dominant force in the future
politics of the Fatherland
So Hitler was both a fairly typical
pre-war Leftist in most respects and would also make a pretty good modern
Leftist in most respects. Aside from his nationalism, it is amazing how
much he sounds like modern Leftists in fact. And his nationalism was in
fact one way in which he was smarter than modern Leftists. Have a look
at the 1939 Nazi propaganda placard below (a Wochenspruch for the
Gau Weser/Ems). The placard promotes one of Hitler's sayings. The saying
is, "Es gibt keinen Sozialismus, der nicht aufgeht im eigenen Volk"
-- which I translate as "There is no socialism except what arises within
its own people". Hitler spoke a very colloquial German so translating that
one was not easy but I think that is about as close to it as you can get.
As some modern context for that saying, note that
there have now been various psychological studies (e.g.
here)
showing that people are more willing to share with others whom they see
as like themselves. That leads to the view that socialism will find its
strongest support among an ethnically homogeneous population -- which the
Scandinavian countries notably were until recently. And ethnic diversity
therefore will undermine support for socialism (as in the U.S.A.). And
from my studies of
them, I have noted that the Scots are a very brotherly lot. There is
even a line in a famous Harry Lauder song that says: "Where brother Scots
foregather ...". And of course the Scots are enormously socialistic. When
Margaret Thatcher came to power on a huge swing towards the Conservatives
in England, Scotland actually swung away from the conservatives.
So the "diversity at all costs" orientation and
open borders policies of the modern Left are actually very inimical to
the socialistic aims of the Left. The modern day Left do not see that their
promoting of infinite diversity will undermine support for socialism. Hitler
did.
Perhaps the most amazing parallel between Hitler
and the postwar Left, however, is that for much of the 30s Hitler was actually
something of a peacenik. I am putting up below a picture of a Nazi propaganda
poster of the 1930s that you won't believe unless you are aware of how
readily all Leftists preach one thing and do another. It reads ""Mit Hitler
gegen den Ruestungswahnsinn der Welt".
And what does that mean? It means "With Hitler
against the armaments madness of the world". "Ruestung" could more precisely
be translated as "military preparations" but "armaments" is a bit more
idiomatic in English.
And how about the poster below? It would be from
the March 5, 1933 election when Hitler had become Chancellor but Marshall
Hindenburg was still President:
Translated, the poster reads: "The Marshall and
the corporal fight alongside us for peace and equal rights"
Can you get a more Leftist slogan than that? "Peace
and equal rights"? Modern-day Leftists sometimes try to dismiss Hitler's
socialism as something from his early days that he later outgrew. But when
this poster was promulgated he was already Reichskanzler (Prime
Minister) so it was far from early days. Once again we see what a barefaced
lie it is when Leftists misrepresent Hitler as a Rightist. We can all have
our own views about what Hitler actually believed but he
campaigned and gained power as a democratic
Leftist. The March 5, 1933 election was the last really democratic election
prewar Germany had and, in it, Hitler's appeal was Leftist.
There is here
(or here) a collection
of some of the "peace" talk that Hitler used even after war had begun.
Hitler might even be regarded as the original "peacenik", so vocal was
he about his wish for peace. So the preaching of both "peace" and "equality"
by the bloodthirsty Soviet regime of the cold war period had its parallel
with the Nazis too.
It may be worth noting in passing what a clever
piece of propaganda the above poster was. Allied spokesmen such as Winston
Churchill seemed to deem it a great insult to refer to CORPORAL Hitler.
They seemed to think it demeaned him. Yet Hitler himself obviously did
not think so. He seems in fact to have used his lowly military status in
the first war to identify himself as a man of the people. He used it to
his advantage, not to his disadvantage. It was part of his claim to represent
the ordinary working man rather than the German establishment.
But Hitler had his cake and ate it too. By drawing
a great Prussian Junker like President Hindenburg into his campaign,
he also showed that he had the establishment on his side. It helped to
portray him as a SAFE choice. Hindenburg was no doubt disgusted by such
use of his name but since he had appointed Hitler, he could hardly complain.
For more Nazi "Peace" and other revealing posters
see here
Objections
At this stage I think I need
to consider some objections to the account of Hitler that I have given
so far:
The Left/Right division is at fault
Faced with the challenge to their preconceptions
constituted by the material I have so far presented, some people take refuge
in the well-known fact that political attitudes are complex and are seldom
fully represented by a simple division of politics into Left and Right.
They deny that Hitler was Leftist by denying that ANYBODY is simply Leftist.
I don't think this gets anybody very far, however.
What I have shown (and will proceed to show at even greater length) is
that Hitler fell squarely within that stream of political thought that
is usually called Leftist. That is a fact. That is information. And that
is something that is not now generally known. And no matter how you rejig
your conception of politics generally, that affinity will not go away.
It is commonly said that Nazism and Communism were both "authoritarian"
or "totalitarian" -- which is undoubtedly true -- but what I show here
is that there were far greater affinities than that. Basic doctrines, ideas
and preachments of Nazis and Communists were similar as well as their method
of government.
But, as it happens, the Left/Right division of
politics is not just some silly scheme put out by people who are too simple
to think of anything better. There is a long history of attempts to devise
better schemes but they all founder on how people in general actually vote
and think. Most people DO organize their views in a recognizably Left/Right
way. For a brief introduction to the research and thinking on the dimensionality
of political attitudes, see here
Leftist denials of Hitler's Leftism:
Kangas
Modern day Leftists of course hate it
when you point out to them that Hitler was one of them. They deny it furiously
-- even though in Hitler's own day both the orthodox Leftists who represented
the German labor unions (the SPD) and the Communists (KPD) voted WITH the
Nazis in the Reichstag (German Parliament) on various important
occasions -- though not on all occasions. They were after all political
rivals. It was only at the last gasp -- the passage of the "Enabling Act"
that gave Hitler absolute power -- that the SPD opposed the Nazis resolutely.
They knew from introspection where that would lead, even if others were
deceived.
As part of that denial, an essay by the late Steve
Kangas is much reproduced on the internet. Entering the search phrase "Hitler
was a Leftist" will bring up multiple copies of it. Kangas however reveals
where he is coming from in his very first sentence: "Many conservatives
accuse Hitler of being a leftist, on the grounds that his party was named
"National Socialist." But socialism requires worker ownership and control
of the means of production". It does? Only to Marxists. So Kangas is saying
only that Hitler was less Leftist than the Communists -- and that would
not be hard. Surely a "democratic" Leftist should see that as faintly to
Hitler's credit, in fact.
At any event,
Leonard
Peikoff makes clear the
triviality of the difference:
Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did
not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand
that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of
legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue
of CONTROL. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to
property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right
to regulate the use of their property.
Which sounds just like the Leftists of
today.
Some other points made by Kangas are
highly misleading. He says for instance that Hitler favoured "competition
over co-operation". Hitler in fact rejected Marxist notions of class struggle
and had as his great slogan: "Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer"
(One People, One State, one leader). He ultimately wanted Germans to be
a single, unified, co-operating whole under him, with all notions of social
class or other divisions forgotten. Other claims made by Kangas are simply
laughable: He says that Hitler cannot have been a Leftist because he favoured:
"politics and militarism over pacifism, dictatorship over democracy". Phew!
So Stalin was not political, not a militarist and not a dictator? Enough
said.
In summary, then, Kangas starts out by defining
socialism in such a way that only Communists can be socialists and he then
defines socialism in a way that would exclude Stalin from being one! So
is ANYBODY a socialist according to Kangas? Only Mr Brain-dead Kangas himself,
I guess. And Kangas fancied himself as an authority
on Leftism! Perhaps he was. He certainly got the self-contradictory part
down pat.
Other denials of
Nazism as Leftist
So the challenge by Kangas is really just too
silly to take seriously. More serious is the strong reaction I get from
many who know something of history who say that Hitler cannot have been
a Leftist because of the great hatred that existed at the time between
the Nazis and the "Reds". And it is true that Hitler's contempt for "Bolshevism"
was probably exceeded only by his contempt for the Jews.
My reply is that there is no hatred like fraternal
hatred and that hatreds between different Leftist groupings have existed
from the French revolution onwards. That does not make any of the rival
groups less Leftist however. And the ice-pick in the head that Trotsky
got courtesy of Stalin shows vividly that even among the Russian revolutionaries
themselves there were great rivalries and hatreds. Did that make any of
them less Marxist, less Communist? No doubt the protagonists concerned
would argue that it did but from anyone else's point of view they were
all Leftists at least.
Nonetheless there still seems to persist in some
minds the view that two groups as antagonistic as the Nazis and the Communists
just cannot have been ideological blood-brothers. Let me therefore try
this little quiz: Who was it who at one stage dismissed Hitler as a "barbarian,
a criminal and a pederast"? Was it Stalin? Was it some other Communist?
Was it Winston Churchill? Was it some other conservative? Was it one of
the Social Democrats? No. It was none other than Benito Mussolini, the
Fascist leader who later became Hitler's ally in World War II. And if any
two leaders were ideological blood-brothers those two were. So I am afraid
that antagonism between Hitler and others proves nothing. If anything,
the antagonism between Hitler and other socialists is proof of what a typical
socialist Hitler was.
Another difficulty that those
who know their history raise is the great and undoubted prominence of nationalist
themes in Hitler's propaganda. It is rightly noted that in this Hitler
diverged widely from the various Marxist movements of Europe. So can he
therefore really have been a Leftist?
My reply is of course that Hitler was BOTH a nationalist
AND a socialist -- as the full name of his political party (The National
Socialist German Worker's Party) implies. And he was not alone in that:
Other Leftist
nationalists
In the post-WW2 era, internationalism and a scorn
for patriotism has become very dominant among far-Leftists, but that was
not always so. From Napoleon to Hitler there were also plenty of nationalist
and patriotic versions of Leftism.
That was part of what was behind the various diatribes
of Marx and Lenin against "Bonapartism". "Bonapartism" was what we would
now call Fascism and it was a rival reformist doctrine to Marxism long
before the era of Hitler and Mussolini. It was more democratic (about as
much as Hitler was), more romantic, more nationalist and less class-obsessed.
The Bonapartist that Marx particularly objected to was in fact Napoleon
III, i.e. Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the original Napoleon. One of Louis's
campaign slogans was: "There is one name which is the symbol of order,
of glory, of patriotism; and it is borne today by one who has won the confidence
and affection of the people." So, like the original Napoleon himself, the
Bonapartists were both very nationalist and saw themselves as heirs to
the French revolution. So it was very grievous for most communists when,
in his later writings, the ultra-Marxist Trotsky
identified not only Fascism but also the Soviet State as "Bonapartist".
That was one judgment in which Trotsky was undoubtedly correct, however!
There have always been innumerable "splits" in
the extreme Leftist movement -- and from the earliest days nationalism
has often been an issue in those. Two of the most significant such splits
occurred around the time of the Bolshevik revolution --- when in Russia
the Bolsheviks themselves split into Leninists and Trotskyites and when
in Italy Mussolini left Italy's major Marxist party to found the "Fascists".
So the far Left split at that time between the Internationalists (e.g.
Trotskyists) and the nationalists (e.g. Fascists) with Lenin having a foot
in both camps. And both Marx and Engels themselves did in their lifetimes
lend their support to a number of wars between nations. So any idea that
a nationalist cannot be a Leftist is pure fiction.
And, in fact, the very title of Lenin's famous
essay, "Left-wing Communism, an infantile disorder" shows that Lenin himself
shared the judgement that he was a Right-wing sort of Marxist. Mussolini
was somewhat further Right again, of course, but both were to the Right
only WITHIN the overall far-Left camp of the day.
It should further be noted in this connection
that the various European Socialist parties in World War I did not generally
oppose the war in the name of international worker brotherhood but rather
threw their support behind the various national governments of the countries
in which they lived. Just as Mussolini did, they too nearly all became
nationalists. Nationalist socialism is a very old phenomenon.
And it still exists today. Although many modern-day
US Democrats often seem to be anti-American, the situation is rather different
in Australia and Britain. Both the major Leftist parties there (the Australian
Labor Party and the British Labour Party) are perfectly patriotic parties
which express pride in their national traditions and achievements. Nobody
seems to have convinced them that you cannot be both Leftist and nationalist.
That is of course not remotely to claim that either of the parties concerned
is a Nazi or an explicitly Fascist party. What Hitler and Mussolini advocated
and practiced was clearly more extremely nationalist than any major Anglo-Saxon
political party would now advocate.
And socialist parties such
as the British Labour Party were patriotic parties in World War II as well.
And in World War II even Stalin moved in that direction. If Hitler learnt
from Mussolini the persuasive power of nationalism, Stalin was not long
in learning the same lesson from Hitler. When the Wehrmacht invaded
Russia, the Soviet defences did, as Hitler expected, collapse like a house
of cards. The size of Russia did, however, give Stalin time to think and
what he came up with was basically to emulate Hitler and Mussolini. Stalin
reopened the churches, revived the old ranks and orders of the Russian
Imperial army to make the Red Army simply the Russian Army and stressed
patriotic appeals in his internal propaganda. He portrayed his war against
Hitler not as a second "Red" war but as 'Vtoraya Otechestvennaya Vojna'
-- The Second Patriotic War -- the first such war being the Tsarist defence
against Napoleon. He deliberately put himself in the shoes of Russia's
Tsars!
Russian patriotism proved as strong as its German
equivalent and the war was turned around. And to this day, Russians still
refer to the Second World War as simply "The Great Patriotic War". Stalin
may have started out as an international socialist but he soon became a
national socialist when he saw how effective that was in getting popular
support. Again, however, it was Mussolini who realized it first. And it
is perhaps to Mussolini's credit as a human being that his nationalism
was clearly heartfelt where Stalin's was undoubtedly a mere convenience.
I think, however, that the perception of Hitler
as a Leftist is more difficult for those with a European perspective than
for those with an Anglo-Saxon one. To many Europeans you have to be some
sort of Marxist to be a Leftist and Hitler heartily detested Marxism so
cannot have been a Leftist. I write for the Anglosphere, however, and in
my experience the vast majority of the Left (i.e. the US Democrats, The
Australian Labor Party, the British Labour Party) have always rejected
Marxism too so it seems crystal clear to me that you can be a Leftist without
accepting Marxist doctrines. So Hitler's contempt for Marxism, far from
convincing me that he was a non-Leftist, actually convinces me that he
was a perfectly conventional Leftist! The Nazi Party was what would in
many parts of the world be called a "Labor" party (not a Communist party).
And, as already mentioned, the moderate Leftists
of Germany in Hitler's own day saw that too. The Sozialistische Partei
Deutschlands (SPD) who, like the US Democrats, the Australian Labor
Party and the British Labour Party, had always been the principal political
representatives of the Labor unions, on several important occasions voted
WITH the Nazis in the Reichstag (German Federal Parliament).
Non-Marxist objections
Objections to my account of Hitler as a Leftist
can however be framed in more Anglocentric terms than the ones I have covered
so far. In particular, my pointing to Hitler's subjugation of the individual
to the State as an indication of his Leftism could be challenged on the
grounds that conservatives too do on some occasions use government to impose
restrictions on individuals -- particularly on moral issues. The simple
answer to that, of course, is that conservatism is not anarchism. Conservatives
do believe in SOME rules. As with so much in life, it is all a matter of
degree and in the centrist politics
that characterize the Anglo-Saxon democracies, the degree of difference
between the major parties can be small. But to compare things like opposition
to homosexual "marriage" with the bloodthirsty tyranny exercised by Hitler,
Stalin and all the other extreme Leftists is laughable indeed.
And it is the extremists who show the real nature
of the beast as far as Leftism is concerned. Once Leftists throw off the
shackles of democracy and are free to do as they please we see where their
values really lie. Extreme conservatism (i.e. libertarianism), by contrast,
exists only in theory (i.e. it has never gained political power anywhere
in its own right). Conservatives are not by nature extremists. The issue
of allegedly conservative Latin American dictators and the evidence that
the core focus of conservatism has historically been on individual liberties
versus the State is considered at some length here.
Another more contentious point
is that many of the conservative attempts at regulating people's lives
are Christian rather than conservative in origin and that Christianity
and conservatism are in fact separable. So conservatism should not be blamed
for the multifarious deeds of Christians. But to discuss an issue as large
and as contentious as that would be far too great a digression here. A
discussion of it can however be found elsewhere.
But Neo-Nazis
are Rightist!
A remaining important objection to the account
I have given so far is that Hitler's few remaining admirers in at least
the Anglo-Saxon countries all seem to be on the political far-Right. In
discussing that, however, I must immediately insist that I am not discussing
antisemitism generally. Antisemitism and respect for Hitler are far from
the same thing. Although vocal support for antisemitism was in Hitler's
day widespread across the American political spectrum -- from Henry Ford
on the Right to "Progressives" on the Left -- such support is these days
mostly to be found on the extreme Left and for such people Hitler is anathema.
And the antisemitism of the former Soviet leadership also shows that antisemitism
and respect for Hitler are not at all one and the same.
But in the Anglosphere countries Hitler DOES still
have his admirers among a tiny band of neo-Nazis and it is true that these
are usually called the extreme Right. They normally refer to themselves
as "The Right", in fact. How do I know that? I know that because I in fact
happen to be one of the very few people to have studied neo-Nazis intensively.
And I have reported my findings about them in the academic journals --
see here and here.
But if Hitler was a socialist, how come that these "far-Rightists" still
admire him?
Before I answer that, however, I must point out
that the description "Far-Right" is a great misnomer for the successors
of Hitler in modern-day Germany. As we will see below,
modern-day German neo-Nazis are demonstrably just as Leftist as Hitler
was. So are American, British and Australian neo-Nazis also Leftist in
any sense?
The answer to that is a simple one: They are pre-war
Leftists, just as Hitler was. They are a relic in the modern world of thinking
that was once common on the Left but no longer is. They are a hangover
from the past in every sense. They are antisemitic just as Hitler was.
They are racial supremacists just as Hitler was. They are advocates of
discipline just as Hitler was. They are advocates of national unity just
as Hitler was. They glorify war just as Hitler did etc. And all those things
that Hitler advocated were also advocated among the
prewar American Left.
That does however raise the question of WHY such
thinking is seen as "Rightist" today. And the answer to THAT goes back
to the nature of Leftism! The political content of Leftism varies greatly
from time to time. The sudden about-turn of the Left on antisemitism in
recent times is vivid proof of that. And what the political content of
Leftism is depends on the Zeitgeist -- the conventional wisdom of
the day. Leftists take whatever is commonly believed and push it to extremes
in order to draw attention to themselves as being the good guys -- the
courageous champions of popular causes. So when the superiority of certain
races was commonly accepted, Leftists were champions of racism. So when
eugenics was commonly accepted as wise, Leftists were champions of eugenics
-- etc. In recent times they have come to see more righteousness to be
had from championing the Palestinian Arabs than from championing the Jews
so we have seen their rapid transition from excoriating antisemitism to
becoming "Antizionist".
But the thinking of the man in the street does
not change nearly as radically as Leftists do. Although it may no longer
be fashionable, belief in the superiority of whites over blacks is still
widespread, for instance. Such beliefs have become less common but they
have not gone away. They are however distinctly non-Leftist in today's
climate of opinion so are usually defined as "Rightist" by default. So
the beliefs of the neo-Nazis are Rightist only in the default sense of
not being currently Leftist. They are part of the general stream of popular
thinking but that part of it which is currently out of fashion. I say a
little more on that elsewhere.
And so it is because the old-fashioned thinking
of the neo-Nazis is these days thoroughly excoriated by the Left that they
see themselves as of the Right and reject any idea that they are socialists.
I can attest from my own extensive interviews with Australian neo-Nazis
(see here and here)
that they mostly blot out any mention of Hitler's socialism from their
consciousness. The most I ever heard any of them make out of it was that,
by "socialism", Hitler was simply referring to national solidarity and
everybody pulling together -- which was indeed a major part of Hitler's
message and which has been a major aim of socialism from Hegel
on. And things like autarky and government control of the whole of society
were attractive to them too so they were in fact far more socialist than
they would ever have acknowledged. They don't realize that they are simply
old-fashioned Leftists. Since most of the world seems to have forgotten
what pre-war Leftism consisted of, however, that is hardly surprising.
And the neo-Nazis are assisted in their view of
themselves as Rightist by Hitler's anticommunism. The falling-out among
the Nazis and the Communists was in Hitler's day largely a falling-out
among thieves but the latter half of the second world war made the opposition
between the two very vivid in the public consciousness so that opposition
has become a major part of the definition of what Nazism is. And Marxism/Leninism
was avowedly internationalist rather than racist. Lenin and the Bolsheviks
despised nationalism and wished to supplant national solidarity with class
solidarity. Given the contempt for Slavs often expressed by Marx
& Engels, one can perhaps understand that Lenin and his Russian
(Slavic) Bolsheviks concentrated so heavily on Marx & Engels's vision
of international worker solidarity and ignored the thoroughly German nationalism
also often expressed by Engels in particular.
That class-war was the best way to better the
economic position of the worker was, however, never completely obvious.
The Fascists did not think so nor did most Leftists in democratic countries.
Nonetheless, the internationalist and class-based (rather than race-based)
nature of Communism did have the effect in the postwar era of identifying
Leftism with skepticism about patriotism, nationalism and any feeling that
the traditions of one's own country were of great value. The result of
this was that people with strong patriotic, nationalist and traditionalist
feelings in the Anglo-Saxon countries felt rather despised and oppressed
by the mostly Leftist intelligentsia and sought allies and inspiration
wherever they could. And Hitler was certainly a great exponent of national
pride, community traditions and patriotism. So those who felt marginalized
by their appreciation of their own traditional values and their own community
must have been tempted in some extreme cases to feel some sympathy for
Hitler.
Insane?
But what about Hitler's insanity? There have been
many proposed explanations of Hitler's influence and deeds but nearly all
of the social scientific explanations very rapidly come up with the word
"insanity" or one of its synonyms (e.g. Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson
& Sanford, 1950). Attributing mental illness or mental disturbance
to Hitler seems to be the only way that many people can deal with his malign
legacy.
Proving a negative is of course
notoriously difficult so proving that Hitler was NOT insane is something
we can only do probabilistically. As perhaps some initial context however,
consider this description of a German country gentleman of Hitler's day:
"There is nothing pretentious about his
little estate. It is one that any merchant might possess in these lovely
hills. All visitors are shown their host's model kennels, where he keeps
magnificent Alsatians. Some of his pedigree pets are allowed the run of
the house, especially on days when he gives a "Fun Fair" for the local
children. He delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially
painters, singers and musicians. As host he is a droll raconteur. Every
morning at nine he goes out for a talk with his gardeners about their day's
work. These men, like the chauffeur and air-pilot, are not so much servants
as loyal friends. A life-long vegetarian at table, his kitchen plots are
both varied and heavy with produce. Even in his meatless diet, he is something
of a gourmet. He is his own decorator, designer and furnisher, as well
as architect."
This apparently pleasant, artistic country gentleman
was described in the 1938 edition of the British "Homes & Gardens"
magazine -- which is now on the net here.
It sounds about as good an opposite to the insane Hitler as one could get,
does it not? In reality, of course, it is a description of Hitler himself.
The story of how the article concerned came to be posted on the internet
is here
or here.
So we surely do need to look at the plausibility
of the "insanity" claim. Do madmen achieve popular acclaim among their
own people? Do madmen inspire their countrymen to epics of self-sacrifice?
Do madmen leave a mark on history unlike any other? Until Hitler came along,
the answers to all these questions would surely have been "no". And to
claim that one of the 20th. century's greatest diplomatic tacticians was
insane is implausible, to say the least. Had he stuck to diplomacy (he
had already taken over two countries "without a shot being fired"), he
would undoubtedly have died of old age amid near-universal acclaim from
a much-enlarged Reich -- exactly as Bismarck did before him. But
Bismarck was a conservative and Hitler was a Leftist -- and therein lay
a crucial and tragic difference. See here.
And there have of course been many attempts to
make serious psychiatric assessments of the mental health of the Nazi party
leadership (e.g. Ritzler, 1978; Zillmer et al., 1989). There were several
made immediately after the war. They all conclude that the Nazi leadership
was overwhelmingly sane so perhaps it will suffice to excerpt a few comments
about just one such study:
"Now the book the Florida State University
professor fine-tuned - "The Nuremberg Interviews" - is being heralded for
giving the world new insights into the chilling thoughts of Nazi leaders
responsible for the Holocaust, the systematic extermination of more than
6 million Jews during World War II.... "There is this kind of inner logic
behind the outer madness," Gellately said of the book's 33 interviews.
"That's the horror of the thing." That's because, Gellately said, for the
most part, these Nazi rulers were as normal as next-door neighbors. "I
think we all have an idea about what makes the Nazis tick. Some of us think
they were demonic or crazy ... Really, two people in the book are like
that, but they are not the interesting ones," Gellately said. "Most of
the other ones are like you and me. They are well-educated, rational, sensible."
They pour out their thoughts to Dr. Leon Goldensohn, a U.S. Army psychiatrist,
who kept detailed notes of his interviews with the war criminals and witnesses
awaiting trial in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1946..... "They had a sense of
duty, perverted, but they were rational, kind of cold, calculating killers,"
he said, "not this emotional, go-out-and-shoot-their-friend-in-the-woods
kind of thing. You can't prove these were guys that actually hated the
Jews or actually ever hit anyone".
(Source)
So is there an alternative explanation? Is there
something other than mental illness that can explain Hitler's success?
If there is we surely owe it to ourselves and to our children to find out.
If by dismissing Hitlerism as madness we miss what really went on in Hitler's
rise to power we surely run dreadful risks of allowing some sort of Nazi
revival. The often extreme expressions of nationalism to be heard from
Russia today surely warn us that a Fascist upsurge in a major European
State is no mere bogeyman. What we fail to understand we may be unable
to prevent. All possible explanations for the Nazi phenomenon do surely
therefore demand our attention. It is the purpose of the present paper,
therefore, to explain the rise and power of Hitler's Nazism in a way that
does not take the seductive route of invoking insanity.
So how did Hitler
gain so much influence?
I will submit the radically simple thesis that
Hitler's appeal to Germans was much as the name of his political party
would suggest -- a heady brew of rather extreme Leftism (socialism) combined
with equally extreme nationalism -- with Hitler's obsession with the Jews
being a relatively minor aspect of Nazism's popular appeal, as Dietrich
(1988) shows. There were nationalist Leftists long before Hitler (Napoleon
Bonaparte for one) -- as Karlheinz Weissmann shows at length
here
(PDF) but the usual "all men are equal" dogma of the Left and their Marxist
belief in the all-important role of social class usually inhibited 20th
century Leftists from being really keen nationalists. Hitler felt no such
inhibitions.
And in that he had available the very influential
model of the American "Progressives". They much preceded Hitler -- beginning
in the late 19th century -- but their influence was evident in the thinking
and policies of three very notable Presidents -- the two Roosevelts and
Woodrow Wilson. They too were on the nationalist and racialist side of
Leftist thinking (see here)
and the almost complete dominance of "Progressive" thinking in American
political life of the prewar era cannot have been lost on Hitler. What
Hitler added was not so much new thinking or new policies as his characteristic
passion. He added passion and an ability to communicate with the average
man to what had up until then been a largely intellectual doctrine. So
his "Ein Volk" dogma in effect very cleverly substituted the usual
leftist dogma with "All GERMANS are equal" -- and also, of course, superior
to non-Germans.
And Hitler's nationalism did have the very great
appeal of being at least apparently heartfelt. Right from the earliest
chapters of Mein Kampf Hitler's love of his German nation (Volk)
stands out. And that his constantly expressed love of his people and belief
in their greatness should have earned him their love and belief in return
is supremely unsurprising. A book recently released in Germany does make
some allusion to that. Excerpt from a
review of it:
"A well-respected German historian has
a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans
so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly,
was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important,
but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state. To do so, he
gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today
anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war
not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once
during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people.
He also -- in great contrast to World War I -- particularly pampered soldiers
and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits
that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw
Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book
"Hitler's People's State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism"
and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt"
There is a useful review of the English-language
version of the book here
(or here)
-- a review which correctly makes the point that the loyalty of Germans
to Hitler cannot have been primarily economic. Hitler's socialist provisions
for ordinary Germans were important but primarily functioned as evidence
to them of how much Hitler cared for his Volk. It was primarily
emotional satisfaction that Hitler gave to Germans.
I will say more about Hitler's love of his people
in connection with my discussion of his antisemitism below
but the excitement and involvement that he generated among large numbers
of Germans can only really be appreciated by listening to his speeches
at rallies. I imagine that even listeners who understand no German would
get some idea of the tremendous feeling of excitement that he generated
among his hearers. The language of music is universal however so some feel
for the era might perhaps be gained by listening to this.
It is a recording of Hitler's personal "Badenweiler" march and appears
to be taken from the soundtrack of a 1930s film of a party rally. The Badenweiler
would normally be played as Hitler made one of his grand entrances to a
rally. Note particularly the crowd sounds in the background. Hitler may
not have been much of an artist with paints but he was certainly one of
the greatest political artists of all time -- dubious accolade as that
is. He is already
the most remembered personality of the 20th century and seems destined
to remain so. What that says about humanity,
I will leave to readers to fill out.
{Parenthetically: It is odd in fact how
little the "love" feature of Hitler's appeal is noted. There seems almost
to be a universal embarrassment about discussing such a thing. And the
embarrassment (or is it fear?) is not confined to discussions of Hitler.
Napoleon too created the impression that he had a love-affair with the
French (though in his early life he despised them!) and that love was returned
in full measure too -- and in fact still is! And two other socialistic
and dictatorial glorifiers of their own people who managed NOT to come
out on the wrong side of World War II -- Pilsudski in Poland and Peron
in Argentina -- remain much beloved in their respective countries to this
day too.
And a similar message in more recent times from
the ex-communist dictator Slobodan Milosevic to the Serbian people secured
him great popularity with them too -- a popularity that was only partly
damaged by the rain of American bombs that he brought upon his country.
And who can forget the power of the love affair
that Ronald Reagan had with the American people (a small example of Reagan's
attitude is here)
-- a love affair that enabled him to jolt not only the entire American
political scene sharply rightwards but in fact jolted the entire world
rightwards!
And, going back further in time, the rather extraordinary
influence of Disraeli may be noted. He may fairly be said to have transformed
English Conservatism and his death was greeted with great expressions
of loss nationwide. He too was unstinting in his expressions of admiration
for England and Englishness and was famous for the trust he reposed in
ordinary English people. And he did so while not for a moment backing down
from his pride in his own Hebrew origins! Love between the leader and the
led seems to be the great unmentionable of politics generally. Perhaps
its power is too frightening for most people even to think about.}
To return to Hitler: Note also that, horrible and
massive though the Nazi crimes were, they were anything but unique. For
a start, government by tyranny is, if anything, normal in human history.
And both antisemitism and eugenic theories were normal in prewar Europe.
Further back in history, even Martin Luther wrote a most vicious and well-known
attack on the Jews. And Nazi theories of German racial superiority differed
from then-customary British beliefs in British racial superiority mainly
in that the British views were implemented with typical conservative moderation
whereas the Nazi views were implemented with typical Leftist fanaticism
and brutality (cf. Stalin and Pol Pot). And the Nazi and Russian pogroms
differed mainly in typically greater German thoroughness and efficiency.
And waging vicious wars and slaughtering people "en masse" because of their
supposed group identity have been regrettably common phenomena both before
and after Hitler (e.g. Stalin's massacres of Kulaks and Ukrainians, the
unspeakable Pol Pot's massacres of all educated Cambodians, Peru's "Shining
Path", the Nepalese Marxists, the Tamil Tigers and the universal Communist
mass executions of "class-enemies"). Both Stalin and Mao Tse Tung are usually
"credited" with murdering far more "class enemies" than Hitler executed
Jews.
And another aspect of Hitler's "normality" is
that, as he came closer to power, he did reject the outright nationalization
of industry as too Marxist. As long as the State could enforce its policies
on industry, Hitler considered it wisest to leave the nominal ownership
and day to day running of industry in the hands of those who had already
shown themselves as capable of running and controlling it. This policy
is broadly similar to the once much acclaimed Swedish model of socialism
in more recent times so it is amusing that it has often been this policy
which has underpinned the common claim that Hitler was Rightist. What is
Leftist in Sweden was apparently Rightist in Hitler! There are of course
many differences between postwar Sweden and Hitler's Germany but the point
remains that Hitler's perfectly reasonable skepticism about the virtues
of nationalizing all industry is far from sufficient to disqualify him
as a Leftist.
Hitler also did not frighten off Christians the
way Communists always have. The aggressive atheism of Communism is very
foolish if you have a large Christian element in your population -- and
Hitler was not that foolish. There are a number of notable statements generally
quoted in which he paid lip-service to Christianity and his concordat with
the Pope is of course well-known. Like Communism, Nazism was really a rival
religion to Christianity so any real reconciliation between the two was
not ultimately possible but much interim advantage could be gained by temporizing
and compromise. And the influence of Hegel
was useful in that regard too -- as Hegel believed in a guiding spirit
behind history. Marx and Engels largely subtracted this spiritual element
from Hegel but Hitler did not and the following statement by Hitler is
in fact pure Hegelianism while at the same time sounding enough like orthodox
Christianity to be thoroughly comforting to Christians:
"In five years we have transformed a
people who were humiliated and powerless because of their internal disruption
and uncertainty, into a national body, politically united, and imbued with
the strongest self-confidence and proud assurance. If Providence had not
guided us I would often have never found these dizzy paths. Thus it is
that we National Socialists have in the depths of our hearts our faith.
No man can fashion world history or the history of peoples unless upon
his purpose and his powers there rests the blessing of this Providence."
For more on the Hegelian background to Hitler's thinking,
see here. It seems
clear that Hitler did believe in God but any claim that he was himself
in any significant sense a Christian is of course absurd -- as anybody
who has read Shirer in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (chapter
headed "Triumph and Consolidation", subsection "The Persecution of the
Christian Churches") will be well aware. For those who do want to explore
that issue further, however, I have put together a short document
here.
A democratic
Leftist!
But Hitler was not a revolutionary Leftist. He
fought many elections and finally came to power via basically democratic
means.
It is true that both Hitler and Mussolini received
financial and other support from big businessmen and other "establishment"
figures but this is simply a reflection of how radicalized Germany and
Italy were at that time. Hitler and Mussolini were correctly perceived
as a less hostile alternative (a sort of vaccine) to the Communists.
And what was that about election campaigns? Yes,
Hitler did start out as a half-hearted revolutionary (the Munich Putsch)
but after his resultant incarceration was able enough and flexible enough
to turn to basically democratic methods of gaining power. He was thenceforth
the major force in his party insisting on legality for its actions and
did eventually gain power via the ballot box rather than by way of violent
revolution. It is true that the last election (as distinct from referenda)
he faced (on May 3rd, 1933) gave him a plurality (44% of the popular vote)
rather than a majority but that is normal in any electoral contest where
there are more than two candidates. Britain's Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
never gained a majority of the popular vote either. After the May 1933
elections, Hitler was joined in a coalition government by Hugenburg's Nationalist
party (who had won 8% of the vote) to give a better majority (52%) than
many modern democratic governments enjoy. On March 24th, 1933 the Reichstag
passed an "Enabling Act" giving full power to Hitler for four years (later
extended by referendum). The Centre Party voted with the Nazi-led coalition
government. Thus Hitler's accession to absolute power was quite democratically
achieved. Even Hitler's subsequent banning of the Communist party and his
control of the media at election time have precedents in democratic politics.
Even the torturous backroom negotiations that
led to Hitler's initial appointment as Kanzler (Chancellor, Prime
Minister) by President Hindenburg on January 30th, 1933 hardly delegitimize
that appointment or make it less democratic. Shirer (1964) and others describe
this appointment as being the outcome of a "shabby political deal" but
that would seem disingenuous. The fact is that Hitler was the leader of
the largest party in the Reichstag and torturous backroom negotiations
about alliances and deals generally are surely well-known to most practitioners
of democratic politics. One might in fact say that success at such backroom
negotiations is almost a prerequisite for power in a democratic system
-- particularly, perhaps, under the normal European electoral system of
proportional representation. It might in fact not be too cynical to venture
the comment that "shabby political deals" have been rife in democracy at
least since the time of Thucydides. Some practitioners of them might even
claim that they are what allows democracy to work at all.
The fact that Hitler appealed to the German voter
as basically a rather extreme social democrat is also shown by the fact
that the German Social Democrats (orthodox democratic Leftists who controlled
the unions as well as a large Reichstag deputation) at all times
refused appeals from the German Communist party for co-operation against
the Nazis. They evidently felt more affinity with Hitler than with the
Communists. Hitler's eventual setting up of a one-party State and his adoption
of a "four year plan", however, showed who had most affinity with the Communists.
Hitler was more extreme than the Social Democrats foresaw.
The only heartfelt belief that Hitler himself
ever had would appear to have been his antisemitism but his primary public
appeal was nonetheless always directed to "the masses" and their interests
and his methods were only less Bolshevik than those of the Bolsheviks themselves.
Hitler's Post-election
Manoeuvres
It is true that Hitler proceeded to entrench himself
in power in all sorts of ways once he came to rule but reluctance to relinquish
power once it is gained is not uncharacteristic of the far Left in a democracy.
In the early '70's, for instance, Australia had a government of a very
Leftist character (the Whitlam government) that tried to continue governing
against all constitutional precedent when refused money by Parliament.
Because Australia is a monarchy with important powers vested in the vice-regal
office, however, the government could be and was dismissed and a constitutional
crisis thus avoided. It may also be noted that the Whitlam government presided
over a considerable upsurge of Australian nationalism. It was literally
a national socialist government. Unlike Hitler, however, it was very anti-militaristic
(particularly in the light of Australia's involvement in the Vietnam fiasco)
and did not persecute its political opponents. Australia has, after all,
inherited from its largely British forebears very strong traditions of
civil liberty.
Among other far-Left democratic governments that
have been known to cling to power with dubious public support the government
of Malta by Mintoff and Mifsud-Bonnici springs to mind. On a broader scale,
the use of gerrymanders by democratic governments of all sorts also tends
to entrench power. Democratically-elected governments are not always great
respecters of democracy. The post-war Liberal Democratic (conservative)
government of Japan never had a majority of the popular vote and ruled
for over 30 years only by virtue of a gerrymander. Yet it has generally
been regarded as democratic. None of this is said with any intention of
excusing Hitler or drawing exact parallels with him. The aim is rather
to show roughly in what sort of company he belongs as far as his attitude
to democracy is concerned. In other words, like many democratic politicians
he was a reluctant democrat (surely more reluctant than most) but his coming
to power by democratic means still cannot be ignored. It meant that he
had to be fairly popular and this affected the sort of person he could
be and the policies he could advocate. As sincerity in a politician is
hard to feign successfully, for maximum effectiveness (and Hitler was a
very effective leader) he more or less had to be the sort of person who
had a genuine feeling for his own people and who thus would not want to
make war on large sections of them (unlike Stalin, Pol Pot and Li Peng
of Tien Anmen Square fame). This meant that the great hostility which seems
to be characteristic of the extreme Leftist had to have another outlet.
Hitler was simply being an ordinary European of his times in finding the
outlet he did: The Jews.
Hitler's Socialist
Deeds
When in power Hitler also implemented a quite
socialist programme. Like F.D. Roosevelt, he provided employment by a much
expanded programme of public works (including roadworks) and his Kraft
durch Freude ("power through joy") movement was notable for such benefits
as providing workers with subsidized holidays at a standard that only the
rich could formerly afford. And while Hitler did not nationalize all industry,
there was extensive compulsory reorganization of it and tight party control
over it. It might be noted that even in the post-war Communist bloc there
was never total nationalization of industry. In fact, in Poland, most agriculture
always remained in private hands.
For more details of how socialist the German economy
was under the Nazis, see Reisman.
Excerpt:
"What Mises identified was that private
ownership of the means of production existed in name only under
the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production
resided in the German government. For it was the German government
and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive
powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what
was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was
to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages
would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners
would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners,
Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.
The Conservatives
and Hitler
And what about the conservatives of Hitler's day?
Both in Germany and Britain he despised them and they despised him. Far
from being an ally of Hitler or in any way sympathetic to him, Hitler's
most unrelenting foe was the arch-Conservative British politician, Winston
Churchill and it was a British Conservative Prime Minister (Neville Chamberlain)
who eventually declared war on Hitler's Germany. Hitler found a willing
ally in the Communist Stalin as long as he wanted it but at no point could
he wring even neutrality out of Churchill. Not that Churchill was a saint.
In 1939 Churchill exulted over the Finns "tearing the guts out of the Red
Army" but, despite that, he later allied himself with Stalin. Like Mussolini,
he was something of a pragmatist and saw Hitler as the biggest threat.
Churchill therefore, despite his opposition to all socialist dictators,
retreated eventually to the old wisdom that, "the enemy of my enemy is
my friend". His basic loathing for both Hitler's and Stalin's forms of
socialism is, however very much a matter of record.
Parenthetically, it should perhaps be noted that
the lessons of history are seldom simple. The fact that the British Prime
Minister who actually declared war on Hitler was a (mildly) anti-Semitic
English jingoist -- Neville Chamberlain -- is something of an irony. Churchill
was soon called upon to replace Chamberlain at least in part because Churchill's
opposition to Hitler was seen as more heartfelt and consistent.
In keeping with the fundamental opposition between
Churchill's English conservatism (Rightism) and any form of socialism,
it might also be noted that German monarchists were among Hitler's victims
on "the night of the long knives".
Nor is Hitler's going to war uncharacteristic
of a social democrat (democratic Leftist). Who got the U.S.A. involved
in Vietnam? J.F. Kennedy and L.B. Johnson. And who got the troops out?
Richard Nixon. I am not, of course, comparing the Vietnam involvement with
Hitler's Blitzkrieg. Kennedy and Johnson were, after all, only mildly
Leftist whereas Hitler was extremely Leftist. All I am pointing out is
that there is nothing in social democratic politics that automatically
precludes military adventurism.
Nationalism
Perhaps the only thing that does at first sight
support the characterization of Hitler as a Rightist is his nationalism.
As already noted at considerable length above, there were plenty of Leftist
nationalists before Hitler (including Friedrich Engels) but there generally
does seem to be a psychological association between political Conservatism
and nationalism/patriotism (Ray & Furnham, 1984). This presumably flows
from the fact that Leftists generally seem attached to their well-known
doctrine that, in some unfathomable way, "all men are equal". They seem
to need this philosophically dubious doctrine to give some intellectual
justification for socialist (levelling) policies. If all men are equal,
however, then it surely follows that all groups of men/women are equal
too. Leftism and nationalism have therefore some philosophical inconsistency
and a wholly consistent Leftist would -- like Trotsky -- have to deny nationalism.
Thus only the conservatives are normally left to promote and defend nationalism
with any vigour. Since nationalism is just another form of group loyalty,
however, and group-loyalty seems to be a major and virtually universal
wellspring of human motivation (Brown, 1986; Ardrey, 1961), this normally
leaves conservatives in principal charge of some very powerful emotional
ammunition. In wartime, as we have seen, even Leftists can become patriotic
but mostly they are at least half-hearted about it (though Hitler's predecessors
on the American Left were far from half-hearted about it).
The great difference between Hitler's nationalism
and Anglo-Saxon nationalism was, of course, that Hitler was much more aggressive.
The American Progressives were satisfied with the conquest of Cuba, the
Philippines and central Panama while the British empire was a slow accretion
over several centuries. Hitler, by contrast, wanted it all and he wanted
it fast. Why?
There are many answers to that but a major one
is the fact that Hitler's Germany was in a very different geopolitical
position to that of the Anglo-Saxon countries -- who were all nicely insulated
by their sea barriers from invasion. Germany had both the vast and brooding
menace of Soviet Russia on one doorstep and the old hostility of a militarily
powerful France on another. That Hitler tried to break out of that situation
in one fell swoop was simply another instance of his passionate character
and his habit of taking big gambles -- gambles which had in the past usually
paid off. And one hardly needs to mention the desire for vengeance generated
by the World War I defeat and its aftermath. And Hitler's proto-Greenie
ideas about Germany's need for Lebensraum have already
been alluded to.
Hitler's Magic
Mix
Nationalism can be a powerfully motivating force
but Shoeck (1966) has shown at some length that envy is also a very basic,
powerful and pervasive human emotion -- and levelling policies such socialism
will always therefore have great appeal too -- regardless of any spurious
intellectual gloss that may or may not be put on them (such as the gloss
provided by the "all men are equal" doctrine). Hitler was one of those
who felt no need for any great intellectual gloss. The raw emotional appeal
of socialism was the principal thing for him.
This emotional rather than intellectual orientation
also meant that he felt no need to deny nationalism. He could be as nationalist
as he liked. And he did like! He in fact had the brilliant idea of using
nationalism to justify socialism: Germans deserved to be looked after,
not because of their innate equality with everybody else but because of
their glorious Germanness. This was extremely clever and hard to resist.
As noted above, nationalism is a heady and universally appealing brew.
Thus Hitler's socialism had a double dose (socialism plus nationalism)
of emotional appeal that enabled him, despite his extremity, to come to
power by way of a popular vote whereas Communism normally has to rely on
bloody revolution and forcible seizure of power. Hitler's brand of socialism
was, then, a cleverer one than most: It had something for everybody. He
stole the emotional clothes of both the Left and the Right. With the Nazis
you could be both a socialist and a full-blooded nationalist. Hitler was
thus simply the most effective figure in showing that socialism and nationalism,
far from being intrinsically opposed, could be very successfully integrated
into an electorally appealing whole. With the additional aid of Goebbels'
brilliant showmanship, the Nazis simply had it all when it came to popular
appeals to the emotions. So Nazism was emotional rather than insane.
In summary, Hitler saw from the outset (Bullock,
1964) that a combination of socialist and whole-hearted nationalist appeals
could be emotionally successful among the masses, no matter what he personally
believed. If the basic message of the Left was "We will look after you"
and the message of the Right was "We are the greatest", then Hitler saw
no reason why he could not offer both nostrums for sale. He did not trouble
either himself or the masses with details of how such offers could be delivered.
Nationalism as
an Exciting Novelty
Something that seems generally to be overlooked
is that the three countries with the most notable "Fascist" (national socialist)
movements in the early 20th century (Germany, Italy and Spain) were all
countries with fragile national unity. Germany and Italy had become unified
countries only in the late 19th century and Spain, of course, is only nominally
unified to this day -- with semi-autonomous governments in Catalonia and
the Basque country. Right up until the end of the Prussian hegemony in
1918, Germans saw themselves primarily as Saxons, Bavarians, Prussians
etc rather than as Germans and the contempt for Southern Italians among
Northern Italians is of course legendary.
So the fierce nationalism of the Fascists (though
Franco held himself above the Spanish Falange to some extent) appears to
have been at least in part the zeal of the convert. Nationalism was something
new and exciting and was a gratification to be explored vigorously. And
the Fascists/Nazis undoubtedly exploited it to the hilt. The romance of
the new nation was an important asset for them.
So if we regard the creation of large nation states
as a good thing (a fairly dubious proposition) the small silver lining
that we can see in the dark cloud of Fascism is that they do seem to have
had some success in creating a sense of nationhood. A German identity,
in particular, would seem to be the creation of Hitler. There was certainly
not much of the sort before him.
There are of course differences between the three
countries but, in all three, an acceptance of their nation-state now seems
to be well-entrenched. This acceptance seems to be strongest in Germany
-- probably in part because modern Germany is a Federal Republic with substantial
power devolved to the old regions (Laender) so that local loyalties
are also acknowledged. Spain has moved only partly in the direction of
federalism and there is of course a strong political movement in Northern
Italy for reform in that direction also.
It is perhaps worth noting that it took a ferocious
war (the civil war) to create an American sense of nationhood too.
Nazism "Bourgeois"?
Perhaps I should at this stage comment very briefly
about the usual Marxist claim that Nazism and Fascism were overwhelmingly
"bourgeois" (middle-class) and lacked appeal to the working-class. This
is a major stratagem that Leftists use to deny that Nazism and Fascism
were in fact "socialist".
I have always found this claim
amusing. As Heiden (1939) and others point out at length, Hitler was a
hobo until 1914 so how does a hobo get to lead a middle-class movement?
And both Roberts (1938) and Heiden (1939) -- prewar anti-Nazi writers --
portray Hitler as widely revered and popular among the Germans of their
day. As Heiden (1939, p. 98) put it: "The great masses of the people did
not merely put up with National Socialism. They welcomed it".
And few people would know more about the Nazi
era than Elie Wiesel. He
has noted:
"The fact is that Hitler was beloved
by his people - not the military, at least not in the beginning, but by
the average Germans who pledged to him an affection, a tenderness and a
fidelity that bordered on the irrational. It was idolatry on a national
scale. One had to see the crowds who acclaimed him. And the women who were
attracted to him. And the young who in his presence went into ecstasy.
And Madden (1987) presents modern-day scholarly evidence
derived from archival research to show that Nazis came from all social
classes in large numbers. Perhaps most useful is the work of Fischer (1978),
who looked at the class composition of the most active and committed Nazi
group -- the members of the Sturm Abteilung (S.A., Stormtroopers,
Brownshirts). He found that "the workers are over-represented in the S.A."
(p. 140). In fact, in the 1933-1934 period, 69.9% of the S.A. were working
class compared to 53.2% in the overall German population of that time.
The Marxist claim is, then, utter nonsense and, as usual, the opposite
of the truth. Mussolini,
too, found supporters and adversaries in all social classes (De Felice,
1977, p. 176). And particularly in the early years of Fascism, Mussolini
often attacked
the bourgeoisie in his speeches!
It is in fact Communist movements that
always have bourgeois leaders and mostly bourgeois supporters. The workers
usually vote for more moderate Leftists. So once again we see Leftists
projecting onto others things that are really true of themselves.
I look at the "class" origins of both German Nazism
and Italian Fascism more fully here
Stalin as a National
Socialist
As has been mentioned already, Hitler's strategy
for popularity was not lost on Stalin. Quite soon after Hitler invaded
Russia, Stalin reopened the Russian Orthodox churches and restored the
old ranks and orders of the Russian Imperial army to the Red Army so that
it became simply the Russian Army and stressed nationalist themes (e.g.
defence of "Mother Russia") in his internal propaganda. As one result of
this, to this day Russians refer to the Second World War as "the great
patriotic war". Stalin may have started out as an international socialist
but he ended up a national socialist. So Hitler was a Rightist only in
the sense that Stalin was. If Stalin was Right-wing, however, black might
as well be white.
It has already been mentioned that in Australia
too, socialism and a degree of nationalism have been found to be quite
compatible.
Ho Chi Minh as
a National Socialist
Stalin showed that National Socialism could be
used effectively against another National Socialist but it took Ho Chi
Minh's regime and its Southern extension to demonstrate that National Socialism
could even defeat the Great Republic (the United States). That Ho Chi Minh
was a socialist is hardly now disputable and it is also clear that he had
Vietnamese nationalism working for him in his fight against the American
interventionists. Their foreignness made this easy to do. Note that the
Viet Cong were formally known as the National Liberation Front. Their primary
ostensible appeal was in fact national, though their socialism was of course
never seriously in doubt. So the nationalism of Ho Chi Minh's regime gave
it widespread support or at least co-operation in the South as well as
in the North. Ho thus stole the emotional clothes of the conservatives
as effectively as Hitler did and the magic mix of nationalism and socialism
was once again shown to be capable of generating enormous military effectiveness
against apparently forbidding odds. So the simple explanation that works
to explain Hitler's amazing challenge to the world also works to explain
the equally amazing defeat of the world's mightiest military power by an
relatively insignificant Third World nation. A National Socialist regime
has such a strong emotional appeal that it galvanizes its subject population
to Herculean efforts in a way that few other (if any) regimes can. It sounds
about as crazy as you get to claim that it was Nazism that defeated the
U.S. in Vietnam but this once again shows how Nazism has been misunderstood
and consequently underrated.
Is Racism Rightist?
If nationalism is no proof of Rightism, what about
racism? At least initially, racism and nationalism seem essentially undistinguishable
so does not Hitler's racism make him Rightist? Hardly. The post-war exodus
of Jews from the Soviet Union and the tales of persecution that they brought
with them are surely proof enough of that. Or was the Soviet Union Rightist
too? There is an association between conservatism and racism in modern-day
America but Sniderman, Brody & Kuklinski (1984) have shown that this
is confined to the well-educated. Among Americans with only a basic education,
the association is not to be found. Similarly, general population surveys
in Australia and England find no association between the two variables
(Ray & Furnham, 1984; Ray, 1984). Any association between racism and
Rightism is, then, clearly contingent on circumstances and is not therefore
of definitional significance.
Finally, it is clear that anti-Semitism
was not a defining feature of Fascism. It was more a defining feature of
Northern European culture. Both Mussolini in Italy and Mosley in Britain
were Fascist leaders but neither was initially anti-Semitic. It is true
that Mussolini was eventually pushed into largely unenforced antisemitic
decrees by Hitler and it is true that Mosley was eventually pushed into
doubts about Jews because of attacks on his meetings by Jewish Communists
(Skidelsky, 1975 Ch. 20) but in the early 1930s Mosley actually expelled
from his party Fascist speakers who made anti-Semitic remarks and one of
the few places in Europe during the second world war where Jews were largely
protected from persecution was in fact Fascist Italy (Herzer, 1989; Steinberg,
1990). Many Jews to this day owe their lives to Fascist Italians.
Distinguishing
Hitler from Stalin
Hitler was, however, more Rightist than Stalin
in the sense that, as a popular leader, he did not need to resort to extreme
forms of oppressive control over his people (Unger,
1965). German primary and secondary industry did not need to be nationalized
because they largely did Hitler's bidding willingly. State control was
indeed exercised over German industry but it was done without formally
altering its ownership and without substantially alienating or killing
its professional managers.
The contempt that Hitler had for Stalin and for
"Bolshevism" generally should also not mislead us in assessing the similarity
between Nazism and Communism. Leftist sects are very prone to rivalry,
dissension, schism and hatred of one-another. One has only to think of
the Bolsheviks versus the Mensheviks, Stalin versus Trotsky, China versus
the Soviet Union, China "teaching Vietnam a lesson", the Vietnamese suppression
of the Khmer Rouge etc. Similarity does not preclude rivalry and in the
end it was mainly competition for power that set Hitler and Stalin on a
collision course.
Under Stalin's wartime innovations, the difference
between Nazism and Communism became largely a difference of emphasis. Both
Nazism and Communism were nationalistic and socialist but with Communism,
socialism was the ideological focus and justification for State power whereas
with Nazism, nationalism was the ideological focus and justification for
State power.
There always remained, however, one essential
difference between Nazi and Communist ideology: Their responses to social
class. Stalin preached class war and glorified class consciousness whereas
Hitler wanted to abolish social classes and root out class-consciousness.
Both leaders, as socialists, saw class inequality as a problem but their
solutions to it differed radically. The great Nazi slogan Ein Volk,
ein Reich, ein Fuehrer ("One People, one State, one leader") summed
this up. Hitler wanted unity among Germans, not class antagonisms. He wanted
loyalty to himself and to Germany as a whole, not loyalty to any class.
Stalin wanted to unite the workers. Hitler wanted to unite ALL Germans.
Stalin openly voiced his hatred of a large part of his own population;
Hitler professed to love all Germans regardless of class (except for the
Jews, of course). This was indeed a fundamental difference and substantially
accounts both for Hitler's unwavering contempt for Bolshevism and his popularity
among all classes of Germans. |